


Return to Night: the FAQ you never asked for

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: FAQ, Fandom Primer, Meta, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 09:13:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything you always wanted to know about <i>Return to Night</i> but were afraid to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Tell me about Return to Night._

Well, it's a novel about Hilary Mansell, a thirty-something doctor who trained as a neurosurgeon but due to Reasons ends up in general practice in the countryside in Gloucestershire. Imagine Harriet Vane if she had gone into neurosurgery. Hilary is intelligent, witty, wry, independent, usually very self-aware, and amusing on the few occasions when she isn't self-aware. One of my favourite protagonists... well, ever, really.

_So she's not, as surgeons sometimes are, an enormous dick?_

Despite a certain desire for admiration and a belief in her own rightness, no, she isn't. You get the feeling that she has the temperament to be a typical arrogant surgeon but her gender and the time period (this is set in the late 30s) have conspired against her.

_Oooh, sounds interesting. Is this a novel about a woman's struggle to have a career and gain respect despite the sexism that she has faced?_

Only tangentially. Really it's a romance.

_I hope it's not one of those romances where the heroine first sees the hero bestriding a horse in a manly fashion, and then later he gets brought into hospital with amnesia and she has to nurse him back to health._

That is pretty much exactly the kind of romance it is. Not amnesia though, just concussion.

_Oh God. I suppose he's your typical alpha hero who teaches her to rediscover her own femininity through the power of his love._

Well, he is jaw-droppingly handsome, drives a sports car, and obviously knows how to ride. He's a wealthy landed gentleman with an Oxford degree. He's a talented actor who could make his career on the stage if he chose, but he doesn't work because he doesn't need to. Oh, and he's also a pilot, soon to become one of the Few in the Battle of Britain. 

_That sounds a bit predictable._

Did I mention that he's twenty-three and lives with his mother?

_No. But I have the feeling that I'm going to hear more about it now._

You are indeed. 

When Hilary first sees Julian, she assumes that he's nineteen. He tends to be described with terms like "diffident" and "adolescent." Having graduated from Oxford with a Third in English, he moved back home and doesn't seem to have done anything since then, apart from a bit of riding and a bit of amateur theatre. He's about as different from Hilary's former lover (also a surgeon) as you could imagine.

_What does she see in him?_

Did I mention that he's stunningly beautiful, to the point that the rationalist Hilary considers his good looks a bit over the top?

_All right, then, what does he see in her?_

Well, when he hits his head in hospital he has this vision of being with her in a cave, only she's also a goddess who intercedes to save him from death. Or maybe she reminds him of his mother. Anyway, when he recovers he's certain that he knows her already and that he's meant to be with her forever. There's a lot of cave-related symbolism.

_I don't get it. Sounds either painfully Freudian or like some sort of Platonic allegory._

I don't get it either. Let's move on.

_Please do. Why don't you tell me what you like about their relationship?_

Mostly I like the bits where Julian is sitting on the floor at her feet with his head in her lap. Or with his cheek against her breast. Or where he is making her toast (while sitting on the floor at her feet). 

_You're kidding, right?_

Yes. But only a little. This novel is apparently like crack for my id. I seem to be all about the dysfunctional, codependent relationships but usually I want them to be all unresolved and ambiguous, whereas with this one I'm all "no, Julian must adore Hilary forever." Perhaps it's because this is het.

_You like the role reversal?_

I love the role reversal. I love that Julian is the inexperienced one in the relationship and how desperately he tries to persuade Hilary to marry him, right down to the "don't you care as much about me as you did before?" on the morning after they first sleep together. I love how Hilary gets to be the woman of the world despite, at thirty-four, only having had one lover prior to Julian. I even appreciate how fondly amused she gets with him, just on the verge of patronising, despite this hardly being the best foundation for a relationship. 

_But you said she wasn't an enormous dick._

I may have lied. Slightly. (No, I love Hilary really.)

_With all this discussion of Hilary being an enormous dick, are you in fact actually making an A/B/O 'verse in-joke?_

Yes. Hilary would totally be an alpha. In fact the novel would make more sense if she were.

_Glad we cleared that up. On a related note, I was wondering: is it possible that Julian has mother issues?_

Julian has mother issues that could be seen from *space*. Hilary aims to liberate him from his mother by, apparently, replacing her. Julian seems all right with this, as we can discern from this classic line, which seems to be what passes for flirtation in Julian World: "Are you going to clean me first and spank me afterwards, or the other way round?" (Hilary's doctorly reply is equally classic in its way: "You won't need any spanking when you've had iodine on that cut, I should think.")

_If that's the seduction, then what's the sex like?_

Mary Renault is about as explicit in this novel as she ever gets, which is to say, not very. Nonetheless we can discern that their first night together is fairly dire from Hilary's point of view: "She thought that, even if she had been an untaught girl, she would never have taken his inexperience for selfishness... [H]e had blundered along with so much poetry, with an imagination that made his passionate and unsuspecting ignorance easy to forgive, and hard to endure." But one imagines that it gets better after that.

_You're really selling this novel, you know that?_

Sorry, I seem to enjoy mocking it more than praising it. I would not in any sense claim that it's as good as _The Charioteer_ but all my mockery is in service of concealing the fact that it just makes me mysteriously happy. Or Hilary does, at least.

_Do you think you may simply may have a thing about red-headed female doctors?_

Beverly Crusher, Dana Scully, Hilary Mansell... it looks like it!

But Beverly was in no way a main character on TNG and even Scully spent a lot of time following Mulder around, whereas Hilary is the protagonist, the protagonist I tell you!

_You obviously feel strongly about this._

I simply cannot believe that in 2013 it is still so unusual to find a novel with a female romantic lead who is an interesting, complex character and very clearly the dominant partner in the relationship. And this was written in 1947! I may be slightly bitter. Anyway, are you going to read it?

_We'll see. I feel as if I may know everything I need to know already._

Oh, we've only scratched the surface here. If you play your cards right, there may be a second part to the FAQ...


	2. Chapter 2

_On to the really important questions: are there any queer characters in this novel?_

Yes and no. In character census terms you could say that it is one of the least queer of Mary Renault's novels, while in literary terms it is just imbued with queerness.

Julian, being a theatre type with an overbearing mother who happens to think he's too effeminate, is of course heavily coded as queer. Did I mention that he's never been seriously interested in a woman before he met Hilary? And that people who knew him at uni thought he might be? Yeah. Personally I would put him in the vicinity of "latently bisexual" but this is merely heavily subtextual rather than canon. 

Whatever his orientation may be, one can't doubt the strength of his feelings for Hilary. If this were a bigger fandom I'm sure I would be indignantly complaining about people trying to slash Julian with all and sundry while shunting Hilary off into a corner somewhere. Just not on.

_Don't borrow trouble! We were talking about queerness. Is Julian's ambiguous bisexuality really all there is?_

How could I fail to mention the epic love of Sam and James? Sam is Hilary's nephew, nine years younger than her. He and his friend James were at university at the same time as Julian and are now living together in London. James is an interior decorator and does all the speculating in the conversation (see above) about whether Julian was actually queer or just spent a lot of time hanging around with queer people.

Sadly Sam and James only appear in the first British edition of the novel, but everyone I know who has read it (we're talking three or four people here) ships them enthusiastically. Oh yes.

While I'm on the subject of Sam, there is also the fact that Hilary seems to have nephew issues in the way that Julian has mother issues, but that's a whole other topic.

_You can't make a statement like that and simply leave it hanging there!_

Can't I?

_Not really._

OK, well, the thing about Hilary's family is that it's generationally a bit complex. She is the youngest in the family, having been born when her parents were already middle-aged, so she ends up having a nephew who is only nine years younger than her. (Older than Julian, in other words!) One gets the feeling that Hilary enjoyed this far too much: she has honed the "aunt act" to a fine art, always edged with wry amusement. And having developed this mode of relating to Sam, it's fairly clear that she deploys the same approach with Julian, whether consciously or not. At one point she reflects that "there must be some happy mean between the conversation of a lover and a well-meaning aunt." But for Hilary there really doesn't seem to be.

_What a wonderful profusion of Oedipal issues._

And I haven't even really expanded upon the role in the story of Julian's mother. Or, as those of us in the know like to think of her, Elaine. (Did Mary Renault have a thing about Arthurian names? I'm thinking of Gareth Straike here.)

Elaine takes against Hilary right from the start, probably because Hilary has managed to do something for her son that she herself couldn't do (namely save his life). She never tells Julian about Hilary's role in his recovery.

While keeping him on an extremely short leash (and saying things like "you're not at Oxford any more, Julian"), she also manages to be extraordinarily withholding of love. Julian is always doing his best to please her--a more solicitous, obedient son could hardly be imagined--and yet it never seems to be good enough. And why is it that she disapproves so inflexibly of acting and the stage?

_This sounds like the sort of novel that has a Dramatic Secret buried in it._

You've got me there. _Return to Night_ is secretly a Victorian sensation novel. It's not enough that Julian's father mysteriously never came home on leave after Julian's christening, dying two years later in France. It has to turn out that he wasn't actually Julian's father at all. Before she married Major Fleming, Julian's mother had a romance with a charming French-Canadian actor whom she married quickly in a Catholic ceremony before discovering that he was actually a bigamist with a wife back home in Canada. Naturally she ended up pregnant and the result was Julian, with his actor's instincts and his beautiful face and his effeminate manners. Which explains why she has always hated and loved Julian at the same time and why she has been so dead set against him going onto the stage.

_What does Julian do when he finally finds all of this out?_

He declares to his mother that he's going to marry Hilary Mansell. Then, rather than going to buy a ring and put an announcement in the paper like a sensible man, he goes in the dead of night to that infernal cave and tries to drown himself.

_No, seriously._

I am absolutely serious. Sadly so was Mary Renault.

Julian simply can't deal with the revelation of his "bad blood" and (this is probably the important bit) the fact that his mother has so clearly rejected him. Luckily Hilary manages to catch up with him and save his life yet again.

_What does Hilary think about all of this?_

She doesn't get all the backstory. But it doesn't matter. She is determined to sacrifice herself by giving herself to him, rescuing him from his mother and allowing him to grow up through the power of her love.

_Sacrifice? She's going to sacrifice herself by spending the rest of her life with a hot younger man who clearly adores her?_

Erm, yeah, that doesn't quite work in my head either. But clearly it does in Hilary's, because she doesn't expect that she'll end up spending the rest of her life with him. I must quote from the book here because I can't possibly summarise this thinking:

> What she had now was not for her possessing... All she had done, and had still to do, must work to accomplish her own loss; to separate and free him, to make him less a part of her, and more his own. Already the new claimants were waiting to receive him from her; the dangers of the coming years; death, perhaps, not this that he would have chosen but alien and lonely; if he lived, the work which would be his most demanding love; the men who would be his friends; the women who would be beautiful when the last of her youth was gone... She would never bear a child to him. It would be too long before she could spare for its needs the love of which his own need had never been satisfied; before his mind was ready, her body would be too old.

_I don't even. All the feels. Do *you* think that Julian will eventually leave Hilary?_

Not in a million years. Absolutely never. For better or worse, he is imprinted on her, and their codependent love is my OTP.

_This whole love-as-sacrifice thing... it sounds really familiar._

Basically the ending of _Return to Night_ and the ending of _The Charioteer_ are almost identical: the unexpected suicide attempt and the resolution of the other character to offer love out of pity and/or compassion. It's... odd to say the least. And the whole gender/Oedipal dynamic in _Return to Night_ makes it even weirder. At least Laurie isn't casting himself as Ralph's inevitably-to-be-superseded substitute mother!

_Are we supposed to believe that Hilary is right about what is going to happen between her and Julian?_

I suspect so? But as said, I just can't see it. Poor Hilary just isn't thinking straight in that cave. What the end of the novel really leaves me wanting is fic where WWII has just finished and Hilary has to adjust to the realisation that Julian is 1) not dead and 2) still madly in love with her. Bonus points if he then proposes starting a family. (Which seems as if it would be possible, Hilary's calculations notwithstanding; her mother was, after all, fairly old when she was born.)

_Do you basically have to ignore the final two chapters of the novel in order to enjoy it?_

I do, yes. But the rest of it is so good that I don't complain too much.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on Dreamwidth in two parts:
> 
> http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/542416.html  
> http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/543119.html


End file.
